The hot zone by Richard Preston The Hot Zone by Richard Preston is an unbelievably true story that makes you really think about the unseen dangers that lurk around us everyday. This book makes you actually see yourself walking into a tiny village in Africa, suffering and dying from some unknown virus. As you approach the huts you hear loud cries from the afflicted tribe members. Coming closer, you smell the stench of vomit mixed with the bitter smell of warm blood. People inside lay dying in pools of their own fluids, coughing and vomiting up their own liquefied internal organs; their faces emotionless masks loosely hanging from their skulls, the connective tissue and collagen in their bodies turned to mush. Their skin bubbled up into a sea of tiny white blisters and spontaneous rips occurring at the slightest touch, pouring blood that refuses to coagulate.
Hemmorging and massive clotting underneath the skin causing black and blue bruises all over the body. Their mouths bleeding around their teeth from hemorrhaging saliva glands and the sloughing off of their own tongues, throat lining, and wind pipe, crying tears of pure blood from hemorrhaging tear ducts and the disintegration of the eyeball lining and bleeding from every opening on the body. You see the blood splattered room and pools of black vomit, expelled during the epileptic convulsions that accompany the last stages of death. Their hearts have bled into themselves, heart muscles softened and hemorrhaging, the brain clogged with dead blood cells (slugging of the brain), the liver bulging and yellow with deep cracks and the spleen a single hard blood clot. Babies with bloody noses born with red eyes lay dead from spontaneous abortions of affected mothers. It is the human slate-wiper, the invisible ultimate death, the filovirus named Ebola.
The Essay on Blood Body Vessels Brain
Concepts of Lifetime Fitness September 1, 1997 Homeostasis is the state of equilibrium in which the internal environment of the human body remains relatively constant. Two excellent examples of homeostasis are how the body maintains a constant temperature and blood pressure during strenuous physical activity or exercise. Although there are many other activities in the body that display ...
The story of Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone deals with man’s one predator, the invisible one, the one that lurks unseen and undetected in the shadows waiting for a warm body to make its new breeding ground in. This predator is the deadly level 4 virus, Ebola. We are “meat”, as the biologists at the USAMRIID Institute stated, no names, no faces, no “individuality”, the virus rips through our bodies with no thought, mechanical reproducers who sabotage our cells and used them as incubators until their “offspring” replicate to the point the cell wall bursts, releasing hundreds of new virus particles. Literally thousands of these “killers”, as humans see them can be held on the point of an ink pen. For the most part, the characters of this book have the utmost respect for all Level 4 viruses, especially the greatly feared and most deadly Ebola Zaire (killing 90% of those infected).
Handling viral samples, infected animals and blood samples, that if detonated, would ultimately result in total carnage.
They were right in doing so, all having witnessed the gruesome effects on living organisms on one primate or another. Gene Johnson, the civilian virus hunter working for the army who specialized in Ebola, perhaps showed the most fear and respect for its destructive capabilities and unpredictable nature. Having visited Africa, researching, studying, and actually staring the virus in the face, Gene knew the virus all to well. In the winter of 1989, the foreigner made its first appearance on the North American continent from an infected monkey who been shipped here from the Philippines.
An “unknown virus” was sweeping through a monkey house in West Virginia, first noticed by some runny noses and loss of appetite, ending a few days later with death; bloody noses, swollen livers, and enlarged spleens. First perceived to be Marburg, one of the filovirus sisters, it was later revealed to actually be the more lethal Ebola. An operation was organized to nuke the monkey house, to destroy the virus, along with every living thing inside; every monkey was assumed a carrier. Of all the people involved in the Reston operation, Gene Johnson was actually the most fearful due to his in depth knowledge of the killer.
The Essay on Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever Virus Disease Ebola
Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever Marburg hemorrhagic fever is a rare, severe type of hemorrhagic fever that affects both humans and non-human primates. Marburg is the first member of the family Filoviridae (or 'thread' viruses), which also includes the Ebola virus. Like Ebola, Marburg is an enveloped, single-stranded, unsegmented, negative-sense RNA virus. It has the same characteristic filamentous ( ...
He knew the possibilities if the virus were to escape the monkey house, through an air duct or walk out inside the body of one of the animal caretakers. He knew that if the virus was airborne, which was what they were finding evidence of, the virus could circle the whole entire earth, wiping out large populations in a matter of days. He didn’t sleep for days during the operation, perhaps out of sheer terror of the idea of an outbreak right here in our own homeland (or the entire world).
The effects could rival those of the Bubonic plague if the virus were to go airborne. Dan Dalgard, the veterinarian at the Reston monkey house, had perceived the virus he was witnessing in his monkeys to be Simian Fever, one harmless to humans. After getting the word from USAMRIID that he may actually be dealing with Marburg, a filovirus lethal in humans, Dalgard was frightened.
He’d heard about the effects of Marburg on the human body, not only would he loose his monkeys, but also he was putting himself and his employees at risk. When he later received a call from the Institute stating that he may actually have a monkey house infected with Ebola, unlike Johnson, he knew nothing about this virus. He’d thought Ebola to be no more dangerous than Marburg. Dalgard did not fully realize the agent he was dealing with.
He knew nothing of the “crashing and bleeding out”, or liquefying of the internal organs to the extent that the elder sister Ebola Zaire caused. Dalgard left his employees to carry on working in the environment. When the Army was in the process of nuking the building, wearing their space suits and air filtering devices, Dan walked in with nothing more than a surgeons mask on. Another character, however, who had had close contact (almost too close at one point) was Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaa x. She, along with Peter Jharling (the co-discoverer of the new strain of Ebola in the Reston monkey house, which was actually found not to be damaging to humans) and Gene Johnson had worked in Level 4 labs at the Institute on numerous occasions. Nancy, at first, seemed to be enthralled by the idea of holding a deadly agent in the palm of her hand.
The Essay on Hot Zone Ebola Virus Zaire
The Hot Zone: A Reaction The Hot Zone written by Robert Preston is a true story describing twenty-three years of shocking and frightening outbreaks of three deadly, incurable filo viruses: Marburg, Ebola Sudan, and Ebola Zaire. In the book, these highly infectious viruses sweep through Africa with a horrifying and devastating range of effects, killing 50% to 90% of their victims. The filo viruses ...
Only a few layers of rubber and latex separated the hot zone of the lab from the inner safety of her space suit. However, it wasn’t until the Reston incident that Nancy fully understood the potential biological disaster that unseen agent could cause. Nancy, and her husband Jerry, head over the 91-Tangos who were responsible for nuking the building, were so dedicated to preventing the leak of this killer into the outside world that she passed up being with her own father on his death bed. She sacrificed being with her dying family member to potentially save the human race. Last, there was the character of Dr. Joseph B.
McCormick, chief of the Special Pathogens Branch of the C. D. C… McCormick, like Gene Johnson, had been to Africa and treated patients suffering from Ebola in Sudan.
He had spent days on end inside the blood-spattered huts, breathing the smell of warm blood, blood infested with Ebola viruses and was never, himself, infected. At one point, he had even been trying to give a woman a shot, and she convulsed, causing him to stick himself with a bloody needle. Lucky for him, however, she was only suffering from malaria. McCormick told everyone that Ebola was not as contagious as they had thought because he hadn’t caught it in his many days in the infected village.
He showed no respect for Nature’s destructiveness Ebola, the human slate wiper as Johnson called it, was nothing more than dealing with any other virus to McCormick. Ebola is a deadly virus to humans and primates, and its origin has yet to be uncovered. There is no cure for any of the Ebola sisters: Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan, Marburg, and the most recent Ebola Reston because of their mutation ability. As for there being a solution to the problem, it may lay in the reduction in human interference in nature and destruction of our own universe or perhaps the end of the species that has become such a nuisance to Nature. Scientists, perhaps, should make developers and loggers aware of such consequences, before its too late.
The Essay on Relationship Between Human Beings And Nature
Now is the time for human beings and nature to collaborate. Normally, most people would say, “human beings always destroy nature.” It is true. However, only a few people know the truth of why human beings destroy nature. It is a huge mistake to think of nature individually. First of all, the main reason people destroy nature is to use trees as materials for paper. As everybody knows, cutting trees ...
There is no Ebola epidemic at the moment, but as the book said, it hasn’t gone away, its just retreated into the shadows, lying dormant there, for now.
